The advent of wireless personal communications devices has revolutionized the telecommunications industry. Cellular, Personal Communications Service (PCS) and other services provide wireless personal communications to businesses and individuals at home, in the office, on the road, and any other locations the wireless network reaches.
Wireless telephone subscribers no longer have to use pay telephones along the road, or wait until they return home or to the office to check messages and return important business calls. Instead, wireless subscribers carry out their day to day business from their cars, from the jobsite, while walking along the airport concourse, and just about anywhere their signals are accessible.
Thus, it is no surprise that since the introduction of the cellular telephone service, the number of wireless telephone subscribers has increased steadily. Today, the number of wireless telephone subscribers is staggering and still growing rapidly. In fact, many households have multiple wireless telephones in addition to their conventional land-line services.
With a market of this size, there is fierce competition among hardware manufacturers and service providers. In an attempt to lure customers, most providers offer handsets with desirable features or attributes such as small size, light weight, longer battery life, speed dial, and so forth. Many recent additions to the marketplace include multi-functional handsets that even provide pocket-organizer functions and electronic mail (email) and Internet access integrated into the wireless handset. Most manufacturers, however, are still scrambling to add new features to their communication devices to snare a portion of this booming market.
Access to email is an important new feature in wireless handsets today. To use this feature, users dial into their email servers. The email can be read on a small screen on the wireless handset. Alternatively, if the email contains a sound file, or a link to a sound file, the sound file can be played over the speaker(s) of the wireless handset. Users can also reply to email using their wireless handsets. Because of the limited size of these handsets, a method for inputting responses other than the common typing keyboard had to be devised. Typically, letters are input based on the traditional telephone keypad. For example, the letters A, B, and C are input by pushing the “2” pushbutton; D, E, and F are input by pushing the “3” pushbutton, and so on. The multiple letters associated with a single pushbutton are differentiated by pushing the same pushbutton repeatedly. For example, D is input by pushing “2” once, E is input by pushing “2” twice, and F is input by pushing “2” three times. As another example, MIKE would be input by the following series of pushbuttons: 6, 4-4-4, 5-5, 3-3.
This method of inputting typed email content, however, is cumbersome. Given the small keypads included on most wireless communication devices, extensive data input may be time-intensive and may lead to errors in the email content. Accordingly, there is a need for a system and method for providing improved electronic mail services to users of a wireless communication device.